OpenID55 items tagged “osx”
sfical.py. Neat idea: write a CGI script that turns a proprietary API (in this case the SalesForce events API) in to standard ical format, then run it on your Mac’s local Apache server and subscribe to it from iCal. 
27th June 2008, 8:09 am
Camouflage. My other key piece of OS X presenting software—hides all of the icons on the desktop (no need to drag them all in to an “Archive” folder every time I give talk). 
15th June 2008, 6:29 pm
Caffeine. I’ve been using this for several months and I love it: it’s a simple OS X menu bar icon that lets you prevent your Mac from dimming the screen, going to sleep or starting a screen saver. Perfect for giving presentations and watching Flash movies full screen. 
15th June 2008, 6:27 pm
Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS. Finally, a decent set of instructions on using a ReadyNAS with Time Machine. The trick is to create a local sparse disk image with a magic name (based on hostname and eth0 MAC address), then move it to the NAS. 4th May 2008, 5:55 pm
iTimeMachine. Enables Time Machine to see network drives (a ReadyNAS NV+ for example). There’s also a defaults setting but it didn’t seem to work; this did. 29th January 2008, 11:33 pm
MacHeist Bundle. Everything’s now unlocked, meaning you can pick up TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X (excellent for screencasts) and Pixelmator for $49. 16th January 2008, 9:44 pm
The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
— Tim Bray 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm
Hacky holidays on OS X. Jeremy Keith documents how to get PHP 5 and Apache 2 virtual hosts running on Leopard. 29th December 2007, 11:49 am
Fluid. Another site-specific browser toolkit for OS X (Leopard only), from Todd Ditchendorf. Again, it’s not clear if this does the Right Thing and creates separate cookie jars for every application. 28th December 2007, 11:42 pm
BBC iPlayer now supports streaming Flash for Mac and Linux. Absolutely fantastic—it Just Works, you hit the homepage and you can be watching video in seconds. No need to even sign up for an account. I imagine IP ranges are used to block access from outside the UK. 
14th December 2007, 12:36 pm
HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events. 
12th November 2007, 11:21 pm
Using Time Machine across the network (via) Haven’t tried this tip yet, but apparently “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” lets Time Machine back up to a network drive. 
9th November 2007, 11:04 pm
PyObjC 2.0 changes (via) All the good stuff that’s in PyObjC 2.0, released as part of Leopard. According to bbum this is the most significant release of PyObjC in 7 years. 2nd November 2007, 6:18 am
Python on Leopard. readline is finally bundled, so the interactive interpreter works correctly without hunting around for frustratingly elusive add-ons. easy_install is bundled as well. 31st October 2007, 5:53 pm
A Roundup Of Leopard Security Features (via) Thomas Ptacek’s overview of the new security features in Leopard. Guest Accounts are worthless from a security P.O.V., but I still plan to use one for our PowerBook that’s now just a media player. 31st October 2007, 5:30 pm
How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images. 29th October 2007, 9:56 am
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. John Siracusa’s 17 page review of Leopard, covering everything from UI tweaks to DTrace sample code. Smart use of embedded video and audio too—I suggest setting aside at least an hour to work through it all. 29th October 2007, 8:55 am
“Open in TextMate” from Leopard Finder (via) Bookmarked for when our copy of Leopard arrives. 28th October 2007, 6:24 pm
Mailplane (via) A commercial OS X Gmail client built around a site-specific browser. 25th October 2007, 7:57 am
It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary. 3rd September 2007, 1:42 am
SynergyKM: The Missing GUI (via) An OS X GUI wrapper around Synergy, the excellent cross-platform software KVM. 10th August 2007, 12:04 am
VMware Fusion Review (via) It looks like VMware are finally catching up with Parallels. 6th August 2007, 11:49 pm
PostgreSQL for Mac (via) Looks like a great way of getting PostgreSQL up and running on a Mac. 10th July 2007, 8:24 am
Python, Mac OS X, and Readline. This worked for me, though you need to already have gcc and svn installed. It’s crap like this that made me switch to Ubuntu on Parallels for most of my Python development. 30th June 2007, 10:24 pm
Mac OS X Leopard: UNIX. Leopard ships with DTrace, and it’s been hooked in to Java, Ruby, Python and Perl. 11th June 2007, 11:05 pm
Mac OS X Leopard: Multicore. “... NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing.” 11th June 2007, 11:02 pm
PDF Shrink. $35 OS X app that crunches down the size of PDF files—useful if you often embed photos in your presentations. 28th May 2007, 2:21 pm
Extending a WiFi network with two Macs and a FireWire cable
Last night’s Oxford Geek Night went really well, despite more than the usual flurry of problems. It’s definitely true that the more geeks there are in a room the less likely it is that the projector will work! Thankfully we got everything up and running in time for the talks to start, although it was a pretty close call. [... 595 words]
DjangoKit. Early preview release of a tool that lets you package a Django application up as a fully contained OS X application. When Leopard ships with PyObjC this kind of thing will be even easier. 29th March 2007, 12:50 am
applications used by simon. My profile on iusethis. 21st March 2007, 1:12 am
Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
— Bill Gates 
2nd February 2007, 6:01 pm
How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X. NTFS driver for MacFUSE, with full read and write support. Great for BootCamp. 27th January 2007, 12:55 am
MacFUSE Tech Demos from Amit Singh’s Macworld 2007 Talk (via) DocsFS, PicasawebFS, ProfFS, RSSFS and SpotlightFS. Eye-opening—especially the ease with which they can be mounted. 27th January 2007, 12:38 am
The Spotlight File System for MacFUSE (via) Finally, an easy way to create proper virtual folders on OS X using Spotlight and FUSE. 25th January 2007, 6:48 pm
Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface. 12th January 2007, 11:36 am
Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
— John Gruber 12th January 2007, 10:29 am
Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
— Mark Pilgrim 12th January 2007, 9:51 am
MacFUSE: FUSE for Mac OS X. Mac support for user-space custom file systems, API compatible with those already written for Linux. Amit Singh runs kernelthread.com; I hadn’t realised that he had moved to Google. 12th January 2007, 9:47 am
macrumorslive.com. The MacRumors ajax keynote coverage gets better every time—now they have live photos in addition to the text updates. Simple but effective. 9th January 2007, 5:11 pm
Apple’s Next-Generation Themes. Cabel’s spotted an Apple patent with screenshots of their in-house tool for creating resolution independent user interface themes. 8th January 2007, 11 pm
Battery Expansion. In which James Duncan Davidson’s MacBook Pro battery goes critical. 13th December 2006, 11:56 am
DarwiinRemote (via) Software for communicating with a Wii Remote from your Mac. 8th December 2006, 4:34 pm
WiiSaber. From the genius that brought you MacSabre. 8th December 2006, 4:33 pm
Startup key combinations for Intel-based Macs. I wisd I didn’t need these... 29th November 2006, 11:50 am
Incompatible SQLite in OS X and Python. I’ve hit this problem; James has the solution. 28th November 2006, 5:40 pm
WriteRoom
I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn’t impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I’m completely sold. It’s a free text editor for OS X with two killer features: [... 157 words]
Fun with ctypes
This probably only works on Intel-based OS X machines: [... 86 words]
Secure wireless email on Mac OS X. Doug Bowman’s tutorial on SSH Tunnel Manager and wireless security. 8th February 2005, 11:20 am
OS X Security Update 2004-09-07 (via) Plenty of important fixes; a must-have. 8th September 2004, 3:45 pm
SCPlugin (via) Subversion plugin for the Finder. 29th July 2004, 1:08 am
PyObjC 1.1 (and move to subversion). “Because it is a Subversion repository, that same URL can be used to browser the source, checkout the source via Subversion, or mount the PyObjC repository in the Finder and copy out any branch, tag or the trunk by simple drag-n-drop.” 11th June 2004, 6:53 am
Daring Fireball: Security Cannot Be Spun. Apple’s communication handling of the recent security problem was atrocious. 31st May 2004, 4 am
Mac OS X helpviewer security flaw fixed. Hit Software Update. Not sure if this fixes the telnet: variety though. 22nd May 2004, 5:08 am
Defending against the OS X help: vulnerability
There’s a nasty OS X vulnerability under discussion at the moment which lets a web page execute code on your machine by taking advantage of a flaw in the “help:” protocol. There’s a non-malicious demonstration of the exploit on this page, and Jay Allen is hosting a discussion on the exploit and ways to avoid it. [... 253 words]
Mac OS X URI Handler Arbitrary Code Execution (via) Very nasty: affects all web browsers, allows compromise by malicious web sites. 18th May 2004, 3:39 pm
